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I’m afraid. Trump withdrew from the Paris Accord walking away from a commitment that we made with virtually every nation on earth.

The science of climate change – global warming – has been debated here and else where for years now. I don’t wanna get into that now except to say that for the purpose of this post, I have settled that we are not in danger of catastrophic warming. Because of that, I am fine with the reasons for rejecting Paris.

But before we rejected Paris, we agreed to it. And that should mean something.

Now, as for the world without American leadership? Screw ’em. I am less and less inclined to care what a Parisan sipping coffee at 2.00 pm thinks of America while the rest of the world refuses to act in most cases. We’re a handful of days away from the anniversary of America’s leadership.

No. What scares me is that without Obama we don’t have Trump. But we had Obama, and now we have Trump.

Barack ruled with his phone and his pen. Paris was illegal. GM’s bankruptcy was illegal. His immigration policies were illegal. Libya? Illegal. And the list goes on and on. So, mostly, as Trump undoes Obama’s work with equal executive orders, I am conflicted. We are removing oddles and oodles of illegal and wrong minded policy.

But I don’t believe that Trump is going to stop. He’s going to get used to ruling, aka Barack, and will simply, and horrifically, continue on the trajectory.

The President never should have pulled out of Paris. But the President never should have entered Paris. Without the first, we never have the second.

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Look, Trump is no shiny nickel. As they say, ‘Elect a clown. Expect a circus.”

But at least we don’t have to be subjected to boilerplate South American Dictator skreed. It’s a Netflix show – I get it. But I was struck by the fact that it could very well have been Obama on that stage.

How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

So, 14% of non-citizens REGISTERED to vote and 6.4% voted in 2008 and 2.2% voted in 2010. That sounds like a lot, but is it?

Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.

Yup – again, it is a lot. And further, may have given Franken his seat as well as Obama North Carolina.

Lots of talk about Obama and his place in history. We recently passed the day marking less than 18 months to go before he moves back to Chicago. So it’s natural to look back and try to identify where he is going to rate.

Not surprisingly, such placements are pretty heavy on the ‘partisan’ influence – for example, Democrats are gonna remember Carter more fondly. And the same holds for Republicans and Bush the Elder.

(CNN)This may be President Obama’s time, but it’s still Ronald Reagan’s era.

Obama has helped negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, normalized relations with Cuba, and watched his approval ratings recently hit a two-year high after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Obamacare. But has he become a “transformational” president like Ronald Reagan?

“He’s simply plowing the ground Reagan cleared 30 years ago,” says Tom Nichols, a political blogger and author of a column “Fantasyland: Obama Is No Ronald Reagan,” referring to Obama’s policies on nuclear weapons and his agreement with Iran.

Shocking. But there’s more:

But we took the comparison a step further. We asked a group of historians and political scientists from the left and right to describe the qualities that make a president transformational. We also asked whether Obama lines up more favorably against Reagan now that he’s reached a deal with Iran.

The consensus was quick. Even those historians who personally disliked Reagan say Obama still hasn’t matched the Gipper — at least not yet.

Here are four reasons why:

Transformational Presidents change the conversation

Transformational Presidents deliver great lines

Transformational Presidents poach followers from the enemy’s camp

Transformational Presidents become beloved figures

President Obama will be remembered as historic; he will be the first black man elected President. But he won’t be remembered for his accomplishments.

Further, Obama’s accomplishments aren’t that heady.

Obamacare remains a massively controversial program passed in the dead of the night with a congress consisting of 60 democrats. To date, not one single republican has voted for the program. Further, it was only finally passed through budget reconciliation.

And we don’t know if the program will do what it says it will. But we DO know that government is incapable of managing large projects.

Cuba, while great policy, is largely insignificant.

And Iran will be remembered not so much a victory of negotiation and statesmanship as a situation in which we were led to water. The coalition behind the sanctions was crumbling and nothing we had control of would or will prevent Iran from obtaining a bomb.

America is more divided now than before Obama and the ‘gaps’ the left hates have grown, not shrunk.

We don’t know that Obama is better than Jimmy much less ranking as one of the greatest.

(Reuters) – President Barack Obama will issue an executive action on Monday aimed at making it easier for young people to avoid trouble repaying student loans, a White House official said on Sunday.

The president will sign an order directing the secretary of education to ensure that more students who borrowed federal direct loans be allowed to cap their loan payments at 10 percent of their monthly incomes, the official said.

I would humbly like to make a recommendation. Namely, that we extend this loan repayment forgiveness effort to students who actually earn a degree that is useful.

There will be a shortage of talent necessary for organizations to take advantage of big data. By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.

Proponents of a large minimum-wage hike have ignored its potential interaction with ObamaCare’s employer mandate, which the CBO suggested may result in a bigger near-term job loss than a wage hike by itself.

Firms that do offer coverage, even of the skimpy variety, would face a fine of $3,000 per full-time worker who receives exchange subsidies. This penalty is nondeductible, so for profitable retailers facing a 39.2% federal and state tax rate the fine would equate to $4,930 in wages. That comes to $2.37 an hour for a 40-hour-per-week, year-round worker.

Coming on top of a federal minimum-wage hike of $2.85 an hour, ObamaCare fines could mean a 70% increase in compensation costs for a low-wage worker.

Obama’s message to his base: “Were here to help you find a job by making you 70% more expensive to hire.”

How did the six ideological groups do overall? Here they are, best to worst, with an average number of incorrect responses from 0 to 8: Very conservative, 1.30; Libertarian, 1.38; Conservative, 1.67; Moderate, 3.67; Liberal, 4.69; Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.

Mr. Kerry repeated his warning to Moscow in remarks to a congressional panel on Thursday.

“There will be a response of some kind [to] the referendum itself, and in addition, if there is no sign of any capacity to be able to move forward and resolve this issue, there will be a very serious series of steps on Monday in Europe and here,” Mr. Kerry told members of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee.

…the Obama administration froze the U.S. assets of seven Russian officials, including top advisers to President Vladimir Putin, for their support of Crimea’s vote to secede from Ukraine, while similar sanctions were imposed on four Ukrainian officials for instigating Sunday’s Crimean referendum.

That is very scary AND serious sanctions indeed!

All this still confuses me.

We support Ukrainians desire to force an elected President out of power – replacing him with one they find more acceptable. But then we fail to recognize Ukrainians desire to separate from the country to join with Russia.